Amazon Prime’s Pippa review: Ishaan Khattar and Mrunal Thakur can’t save this middling war film

Ishaan Khattar plays Captain (later Brigadier) Balram Singh Mehta in Pippa, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Pippa in Punjabi usually translates to a rectangular container. In PrimeVideo’s Pippa, it is defined as “a box for ghee”. In the film, it’s also the disarming name given to a new tank by a soldier who can’t help but fawn over the newly acquired specimen of technology. “Ye meri jaan hai,” he says.

The premise, the playful nomenclature suggests this might be a war film that wants to humanize the relationship soldiers have with instruments and machinery that in the time of battle, become their home and source of comfort. It sounds like a whimsical but promising idea that through Wes Andersonian methods, might cajole war into the pages of a more colourful reading of conflict. And for about 20 minutes, that is where Pippa seems headed. Except when it takes a turn and sets course for the familiar, middling heights of a patriotic summit. Sure, the tanks can swim, but the film unfortunately cannot.

Ishaan Khattar plays Brigadier Balram, in a role that looks too big for his pencil-thin figure. He is a bit reckless, a quality which will obviously translate to fearlessness at a later point.

The year is 1971, and India has decided to participate in the war to liberate Bangladesh from grip of a brutal Pakistani army. Balram is part of a ‘fauji household’ which also includes his older brother Ram (Priyanshu Painyuli), sister Radha (Mrunal Thakur) and a doting widow mother in Soni Razdan, who isn’t allowed to do more than send and receive her kids from duty.

Balram, easily the most unlikeable of the three siblings, it seems, was coaxed into the defence forces. He lashes out at times, but the specifics of his paternal anxieties are never really explored. Balram and Ram don’t see eye to eye, a tense family equation that should ideally be magnified by the call of duty, but isn’t.

Also read: Ishaan Khattar on Pippa: It was an insane experience, being in a war tank

Balram is held back from active duty as war escalates on the eastern front. Ram, undercover with Bengali liberation groups, meanwhile, is captured by the Pakistani army. Now if you think this is a younger brother’s straightforward, blood-soaked rescue of his older sibling then you are, woefully mistaken. Instead, Pippa is comically undeterred by its own pivots. It chooses to meander past the point of no return into bland, unimpressive set-pieces that take place over arbitrary, characterless landscapes. While all this is happening, mind you, Radha, the sister who happens to be a nerdy code-cracker, joins the war effort as a decoder of cryptic messages. If you expect this to be the piecemeal exploration of conflict’s many faces as they branch into a family’s contentious design, you will be let down. And if you expect, in true Hindi cinema spirit, for the siblings to collaborate and centralize the incoherence of the plot, Pippa offers emptiness.

Directed by Raja Menon and adapted from Balram Singh Mehta’s The Burning Chaffees, Pippa has the look and feel of something that stumbled onto promising source material, read it swiftly, translated it hastily, and remodelled it scarcely to produce a film so half-assed, it doesn’t even qualify as jingoistic jugglery.

For one, other than the quirky name, the significance of an ingenious tank is lost on the plot’s map. It’s there but it serves as an anecdotal pointer that this story wants to quote as a rehearsal for sincerity. Cars and motorbikes have been romanticized better in films that aren’t named after them, and yet a weapon of war that is also a vessel for survival, and metaphorically representative of so much else, evokes nothing.

The threads connecting the three siblings, their respective paths, neither contrast nor merge in ways that cinema should leverage. Everything’s ridiculously plain, unremarkably erratic and ultimately, a bit banal. War shouldn’t be so disinteresting.

One of the main problems with Pippa is that none of its three main characters inspires concern or intrigue. Khattar’s arc, his relationship with his machine and his colleagues, is surveyed but rarely excavated for something human.

The acting is passable and though Priyanshu shines (not for the first time in a poor film) there is little material to work with. After a confrontation where they lose their chief, a soldier poignantly tells Balram about his socks, a miserable little metaphor for the tactile and pitiable nature of war that though fought on heart and soul, is won and lost through by tallying the bodies. But it’s one of the few moments where Pippa sounds and feels like a lived-in story and not the empty drum it stands for.

Lacking in several departments, especially a woefully thin script and direction that feels less than enthused about having to turn tanks into characters of war, Pippa cuts a solemn, maybe unnecessarily eulogized figure. We are also repeatedly told that this is a rebellion against oppression and not a war between neighbouring enemies, and yet none of that principled sentiment is injected into the constitution of a film that loses blood without evoking tears. A clumsy climax practically seals the deal with the numbing icing of soullessness. Even Sam Manekshaw, who makes an appearance here, is made to look like a uniformed robot. Only the Pippa, in more ways than one, floats. Everything else gives you that sinking feeling.

Pippa dropped on PrimeVideo on November 10, 2023.